Penguin Parables: Picturebooks, Interspecies Companionship, and Ecoliteracy

Abstract

Abstract: The erasures and evasions that characterize picturebook retellings of the true story of Dindim and João Pereira de Souza are instructive of the ways in which some children’s literature understates, distorts, and displaces human impacts on the environment. By reframing anthropogenic disaster as animal rescue, the story of interspecies companionship effectively mutes and disarms the story of environmental catastrophe. In the process, it forestalls eco-critical awareness of and solutions to problems such as chronic pollution, habitat destruction, species extinction, and climate change. By decontextualizing complex origin stories, erasing uncomfortable facts, and romanticizing interspecies relationships, the picturebooks discussed reveal the challenges to environmental consciousness imposed by the imperative to moral or emotional uplift in children’s literature.